Washington Post
March 14, 2002
Yates Team Aims for Life
By Paul Duggan
HOUSTON -- For 17 days, Andrea Pia Yates's attorneys tried to save her from a murder conviction, arguing passionately in court that she was psychotic and unable to distinguish right from wrong when she drowned her five children. Then on Tuesday, having failed, the lawyers stood stunned and disappointed outside the courthouse, and braced for a new challenge.
"I hope we'll be able to save her life," said defense attorney George Parnham.
That may be a difficult job here in Harris County, the epicenter of capital punishment in the United States. No jurisdiction in the nation imposes more death sentences.
On Thursday, the jurors in Yates's case will reconvene for testimony in the trial's penalty phase. The eight women and four men deliberated for just 3 1/2 hours on Tuesday before rejecting Yates's insanity defense. Now they must decide whether the 37-year-old homemaker, the wife of a NASA computer engineer, should be executed or given a life term with parole eligibility in 40 years.
"Mental illness is still not understood and still not appreciated," Parnham said after the jury decided to hold Yates criminally culpable for drowning the five children, ages 6 months to 7 years, in the family bathtub on June 20. The tragedy focused national attention on the subject of postpartum mental illness, an affliction that Yates struggled with for two years before the killings.
While many people, especially outside Texas, were critical of District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal (R) after he announced in August that his office would seek the death penalty for Yates, lawyers and political observers here said they were not surprised by the decision.
Given complaints that capital punishment is meted out disproportionately to defendants who are black and poor, they said, Rosenthal might have felt that he could not rule out the death penalty for a middle-class white woman, especially in such a horrific case. And forgoing the death penalty likely would have angered many of the conservative voters who were key to Rosenthal's election as district attorney in 2000.
In responding to correspondence he received from people commenting on the Yates case last summer, Rosenthal said his conscience guided his death penalty decision. "I do all this after seeking wisdom from God," he wrote, adding that he follows the law "without consideration of public opinion."
Under Texas law, when the jurors in Yates's case begin deliberating on a punishment, they must first address the question of "future dangerousness." If Yates were spared execution, would she likely "commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society"? Society, of course, would be the inmates and staff workers at the prison where she would spend at least the next 40 years.
Legal experts said the future dangerousness argument may be hard to make in regard to Yates, who had no prior criminal history. So far, no evidence has been produced to suggest that she was a danger to anyone but her children.
If even one juror decides Yates would not pose "a continuing threat," she would be sentenced to a life term. But if the jurors agree unanimously that she would likely commit future violence, they would move to a second step in their deliberations, addressing the question of mercy.
After reviewing "the circumstances of the offense, the defendant's character and background, and the personal moral culpability of the defendant," the jury would decide if there are "sufficient mitigating circumstances to warrant a sentence of life imprisonment" instead of death.
In arguing for mitigation, Yates's attorneys almost certainly will focus on her struggle with mental illness, legal experts said.
Prosecutors agree that Yates is mentally ill. She told police that she drowned her children to save them from eternal damnation. In the guilt phase of her trial, the jurors dealt with the narrow question of whether Yates, despite her delusions, knew that killing the children was wrong. In the penalty phase, in weighing the issue of mitigation, they could consider whether her mental illness led her to do what she knew was wrong.
Yates will go to death row only if the jurors unanimously reject the mitigation argument.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the restoration of capital punishment in 1976, Texas has executed 63 prisoners who were sentenced in Houston, which accounts for nearly a quarter of all executions carried out in the nation's leading death penalty state. Of Texas's 454 death row prisoners, 156 were sentenced in Houston, including three of the seven women on death row.
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